It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and ba
From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Nobel Prize, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young cloth
Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign of terror, this haunting novel tells the story of a group of young students, each of whom has left the impoverished provinces in search of better prospects in the city. It is a profound and powerful look a
The protagonist of Herta Muller's Traveling on One Leg is Irene, a fragile woman born to a German family in Romania, who has recently emigrated from Romania to Germany. The novel focuses on Irene's relationship with three men: Franz, whom she met in Roman
Das eindrucksvolle Bild einer Lebenserfahrung unter absoluter Herrschaft: Herta Müller, die bedeutende und sprachmächtige Autorin, wuchs auf im Rumänien unter der Diktatur Ceausescus. Hier erfuhr sie Sprache als Instrument der Unterdrückung, aber auch
From the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature“[The Passport] has the same clipped prose cadences as Nadirs, this time applied to evoke the trapped mentality of a man so desperate for freedom that he views everything through a temporal lens, like
Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, Nadirs is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Müller's childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child s often nightmarish impressions o
A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceFor eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all
Tells the story of lives painfully intertwined: the unnamed narrator, haunted by nightmarish memories of her father, lives with the androgynous Malina, an initially remote and dispassionate man who ultimately becomes an ominous influence. Plunging toward
